Developing a Notification Plugin

Overview

Notification plugins implement the OSGIKillbillEventDispatcher.OSGIKillbillEventHandler interface. Each Kill Bill event from the external message bus is dispatched to the public void handleKillbillEvent(final ExtBusEvent killbillEvent) method. Such plugins can be a great alternative to Push Notifications in performance demanding environments.

Retries

By default, if your plugin triggers a runtime exception, the event is redispatched right away up to 3 times (or as configured by the org.killbill.notificationq.external.max.failure.retry global property). In some cases, you may want to retry at a later time (if for example a third-party provider is down). To do so, your plugin can throw a NotificationPluginApiRetryException with your own retry schedule.

For example:

// Retry in an hour and in 24hrsthrownewNotificationPluginApiRetryException(Arrays.asList(newPeriod[]{Period.hours(1),Period.days(1)}));

Because of such behavior, any plugin can trigger retries at any time: it is hence important that your listener is idempotent.

Internals

When the NotificationPluginApiRetryException is caught by Kill Bill, the system computes the next retry date based on the schedule specified in the exception and the number of times that specific event has been retried (you don’t have to keep count in the plugin, Kill Bill will do it for you). Retriable events are serialized as RetryNotificationEvent objects and placed in the notifications-retries:extBusEvent-listener-service notification queue.